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Why does a social housing provider bet on interest rate fluctuations? This article presents a case study of the financialization of both housing and the state. Social housing in the Netherlands is provided by non-profit housing associations that have since 1989 been set apart from the state. Many associations started developing housing for profit, borrowing on global capital markets or buying derivatives. Whereas other semi-public institutions moved into the world of finance due to financial constraints, housing associations did so to capitalize on the possibilities offered by their asset-rich portfolios. Vestia, the largest of them all, is an extreme--but not exceptional--case of what can happen when public goals are left to be realized by inadequately supervised and poorly managed private organizations. As a result of gambling on derivatives, Vestia had to be bailed out to the tune of over 2 billion euros. To recoup the losses, housing was sold off and rents were raised. Almost half of Dutch housing associations used derivatives, although most refrained from using them purely speculatively. The changes in the housing sector that led to its financialization cannot be separated from the wider financialization of the state.

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Has the post-war managerial approach to urban governance in the Netherlands and Flanders been replaced by more entrepreneurial and financialized forms? In this paper, we study the transformation of urban governance in the Low Countries through city case studies of Apeldoorn (Netherlands) and Antwerp (Belgium). We show how Dutch urban governance is financialized by connecting local public finance with financialized real estate markets through municipal land banks. However, inter-municipal financial solidarity and ring-fencing municipalities from financial markets create specific continental European processes of financialization. Flemish municipalities, in contrast, have shifted from a model of laissez-faire urban development (embedded in a system of large municipal autonomy) towards entrepreneurial urban growth regimes, in which technocratic public and private actors have increased access to public financial resources, which are used to create large urban renewal projects. In Belgium, autonomous municipal real estate corporations are a crucial instrument for connecting municipal finance to the real estate market.

Revisiting attempts to connect comparative political economy and the geographies of finance, we present a balance sheet analysis of financialisation in the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany from 1992-2012. We define financialisation broadly as a trend towards a greater reliance on assets and/or debt, with particular manifestations across different domains of the economy: a greater reliance on financial tools and metrics for the state and non-financial corporations, a shift to market-based banking and increasing dependence on credit or asset-based welfare for households. We use OECD time-series balance sheet data and qualitative accounts drawn from the literature to overview economic change in our case countries. Using this informal comparison we develop the concept of 'variegated financialisation' by exploring the common but not convergent financialising trajectories of our case countries and relating them to the politics of finance's institutional embedding.